Fraternity among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley.

Fraternity among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815-1914. By Alan R.H. Baker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xviii plus 373 pp. $74.95).

When Emile Zola visited the village of Romilly, outside Chateaudun, in early May 1886 he was struck by the vastness of the sky, the thick yellow soil of the plain, the sight of distant wooden windmills, their white sails turning slowly in the breeze-and the isolation of the inhabitants. "The Beauceron such as I saw him," he jotted down in his notebook. "Clean-shaven, placid, thoughtful and trim-looking characters, a sad manner: the Beauce is sad, the hospitality cold, the peasant lost in this sea of wheat, like a sailor: the effect of the environment, contemplation, sad daydreaming, egotistical withdrawal into one's self... "Zola fed this menu of antisocial qualities into La Terre, one of the most graphic novels on French peasant life ever written. He was much rebuked by the defenders of rural values at the time, and he has come up against a barrage of negative commentary from historians ever since. "This bleak picture of the peasantry," says Alan Baker, adding his name to the long list of critics, "portrays them as being essentially selfish, avaricious, suspicious, land-hungry individualists with little sense of community, of solidarity or even of social responsibility."

Baker has been writing about nineteenth-century rural life in the department of Loir-et-Cher since the 1960s. The basic aim of his work has been to unearth, through detailed research in the local archives, the "practical expression of the principle of fraternite" in the area--not something to which Zola would have given much thought.

Being one of the most beautiful spots on the face of the planet, the area is well worth a lifetime's research. It is an extremely varied zone: the department includes the sands of the Sologne (good for growing irises, but little else), the vineyards of the middle Loire, the Cher, the Renaissance city of Blois, the chateaux of Chambord and Cour-Cheverny, along with the Beauce and what Zola called the "distant blue hills of the Perche". Furthermore--as Roger Dion noted in 1934 in his magisterial thesis on the Val de Loire--between Blois and Beaugency there developed the earliest agricultural syndicates in all France; the Syndicat des Agriculteurs de Loir-et-Cher, founded in 1883, became a national model.

But Baker would trace the 'principle of fraternite' within the department to a much earlier date. What motivates his book is politics. In his introduction he provides a summary of 'revisionist Marxist' polemic, which turns essentially around the idea that peasants were 'politicized'--and thus fraternized--by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Baker sympathizes with this, criticizing those, like Eugen Weber, who have argued that a truly national political awareness developed only towards the end of the century. Baker's central concern is to reveal the process by which "rural communities and individuals came to adopt particular practices and ideologies," and "especially socialist and republican ideas." So he has a real incentive to prove that the fraternal spirit existed in the department of Loir-et-Cher long before 1883.

It is not Zola, but the works of Maurice Agulhon that have inspired Alan Baker. He presents his study as a contribution to the 'history of sociabilite.' But he at once runs into trouble here. Agulhon worked on the nucleated, walled villages of the Var, on their cafes and chambrees, on a political culture that turned socialist (and later Front National). Loir-et-Cher was very different. Its settlement was dispersed, its politics was mainstream France; even today the political gurus watch it as a barometer on national sentiment.

What do thirty years of research actually show? Baker--combing through a mass of administrative surveys, reports and correspondence, kept in uncatalogued piles at Blois--identifies around six hundred voluntary associations founded in the department between 1800 and 1914; most of them were created after 1850. He divides these into six sets, which, in the chronological order of their historical development, should be listed as: fire-fighting brigades, mutual aid societies, live-stock insurance societies, anti-phylloxera syndicates, general agricultural syndicates, and threshing-machine syndicates. The last two might be combined into a single set since the collective purchase of expensive machinery and supplies was the principal purpose of the agricultural syndicates.

In one of his rare statistical tests Baker demonstrates a negative correlation between the distribution of voluntary associations and their distance from Blois. Links with all other variables, like farm size or vineyards, have no statistical significance at all. This is not good news for a study intended to display the principle of rural fraternity.

Baker is surely right to speak of the village fire station, usually found nearby the mairie and the school, as a symbol of the growing power of the State. He is possibly right in thinking that fire-brigade uniforms, banquets (on 14 July after 1880) and the funerals of comrades fostered a certain fraternal spirit. Apparently, the death rate on duty was only 1:21,000--a comforting fact for a total departmental corps of 4,000 in 1914. These numbers, of course, betray the limited extent of their fraternity, while the date of their establishment suggests that fraternity did not come so early. True, the first fire brigades were founded in Blois and Vendome in 1805. But it was only in the 1830s that villages began to get interested, and even then, they didn't get much support from the administration at Blois. Most of the brigades were set up between 1850 and 1875, though many were short-lived because of a lack of funds. There was also a serious problem of intervillage rivalry: rural fraternity in the fire brigades rarely spread beyond the commune's boundaries. And another interesting fact: most members were craftsmen and artisans, not peasants.

Now fire brigades were the earliest rural voluntary associations, and we are already two thirds of the way through the nineteenth century--well past the revolutionary upheavals of the earlier decades. Unlike in Agulhon's work, there doesn't seem to be much of a relationship between the two phenomena.

Among the more interesting aspects about Baker's study are his revelations of local resistance to the cash economy. Until the end of the century, mutual aid societies involved only a minority in the department: in 1890 only 10 per cent of the heads of household were covered for livestock disease and death; as for mutual aid for human beings, less than two per cent of the population was insured before 1870, and still only 6.7 per cent in 1907: no great show of fraternity here. Of the societies that did exist before these dates, most of them operated according to a system of exchange in kind; in the case of livestock, cash payments were made by claim and not by premium, and the meat of the dead cow or bullock would, after payment, be distributed to contributing members; in the case of human beings, members would provide aid to those who fell sick in the form of labour, not money. This would seem to conform to well-established patterns of mutual aid in the household economy in this part of France, but Baker doe s not deal with such matters. A cash-based premium system of insurance only gradually developed in the last decades of the century--Baker can only identify ten in the 1880s. What is even more striking is that livestock insurance societies did not develop in cattle-raising regions like the Perche but were to be found in the more urbanized zones in the Loire Valley. Not, again, a very promising sign of rural fraternity.

Running totally counter to fraternite is the peasant response to the phylloxera crisis. The parasite was first identified in the vineyards of the northern Loire valley in 1876, though it had probably already been present for ten years. In 1884 one anti-phylloxera association was set up; there were 22 established by 1888; but in 1900 only one was left--by which time a large proportion of the vineyards of Loir-et-Cher had been wiped out. Peasants rose in fury against the establishment of these associations, in some cases resorting to violence. Baker devotes several paragraphs to the poor departmental professor of agriculture who set out on a heroic lecture tour in 1882 in an attempt to explain his remedies, but all he encountered was apathy, indifference and resistance. The distrust of these associations was so strong that it had a negative effect on other voluntary associations: livestock insurance societies stood their best chance of survival in communes without anti-phylloxera syndicates. So, not much frate rnity to be found here either.

"It is now necessary to turn more directly to those agricultural associations in which peasantry themselves were very closely involved," states Dr. Baker on page 251 of his 320-page text. After many false starts, dating back to the late eighteenth century, a department-wide farming association, the Syndicat des Agriculteurs de Loir-et-Cher, was eventually set up, as I said, in July 1883. Within a decade it had over 4,000 members; and by 1913 17,000 were inscribed on its registers. Moreover, "during the fifty years [sic] between 1883 and 1913 more than forty such syndicates were founded in Loir-et-Cher." Most of these other associations were tiny and short-lived. But by 1908 Baker calculates that half the heads of agricultural holdings within the department belonged to an agricultural syndicate of some sort or another; in 1914 the proportion was nearing three quarters. Baker calls this the "transition from individualism to associationism in agriculture," indicating the "practical manifestations of the concept of fraternity."

It was a fundamental change all right, but one might question the bit about fraternity. Baker himself admits that these syndicates were 'fundamentally material in character'; their main aim was to purchase farm supplies, particularly fertilizers, securing the best price and assuring its members against fraud. He briefly notes the economics behind this: falling agricultural prices and rising labour costs pushed farmers into seeking a substitute for labour in machinery and chemical fertilizers--the kind of problematic situation that one still encounters in French agriculture today.

Baker even more briskly relates this development to what he horribly calls a 'peasant survival algorithm.' I checked this in a dictionary: 'a step-by-step method for solving a problem.' Whether or not peasant behavior was that systematic, the key obviously lay here, in survival, and not in the principle of fraternite. Zola had been actually quite accurate on this: he limited the principle of fraternity to that point where the division of properties could go no further and the growth of population forced cooperation on the inhabitants. A proper analysis of property and demography is precisely what is lacking in Baker's book.

Baker ends his decades-long quest for fraternity in the fields of Vineuil, a few kilometers south-east of Blois. It is most symbolic--a scene straight out of Zola. In 1880 the Societe Co-operative de Vineuil was founded to purchase a threshing machine. That same summer the new machine started out from the central bourg and proceeded on a clockwise tour throughout the commune. In 1881 it started out again from the bourg, but followed this time an anti-clockwise course ... In 1883 it set off from the edge of the commune and "had a much shorter, linear rather than circular route." With the aid of a map, Baker invites his readers to follow this horse-drawn engine, with the idea that its common ownership and orderly utilization somehow prove "not only the principle of fraternity but also that of equality."

All I can hear is the sound of that engine.